Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals
Open Access

Abstract

Future Perspective of Nucleic Acid-based Detection of Dengue Virus and its Serotypes

Kaihatsu K, Harada E, Matsumura H, Takenaka A, Wichukchinda N, Sa-Ngarsang A and Nobuo Kato

Dengue is an arthropod-borne viral disease of tropical and subtropical areas. A research group has estimated that there are 390 million dengue infections per year, 96 million in whom symptoms manifest. The symptoms of a primary infection with dengue are usually mild and resolve with time, but secondary infection with dengue virus of a different serotype may lead to more severe symptoms such as dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS). No vaccine or antiviral drug is approved for the prevention or treatment of dengue diseases. Therefore, it is important to diagnose the infection and differentiate the serotypes as early as possible. Currently, immunochromatographic assays are used for the diagnosis of clinical specimen from dengue infected patients in hospital, since they can detect the target antigen within 15min without any facilities. On the other hand, nucleic acidbased diagnostic assays such as reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), reverse transcriptase loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP), and nucleic acid-chromatography also are useful for assessing dengue virus infection and virus serotypes in the early stages of infection in a sequence-specific manner. Diagnostic methods that possess advantages of both immunochromatographic assays and nucleic acid-based diagnostic assays should enable us to diagnose dengue virus infection in a rapid and serotypes-specific manner. This paper discusses the advantages and the future prospective of currently developed nucleic acid-based lateral flow assays and their applications in point-of-care (POC) testing kits.